UC Irvine

The field of exceptional points of degeneracy (EPDs) has seen a resurgence in research over the past few decades as theory and practice have coalesced into a better understanding of system behavior along with experimental verifications. Researchers have considered applications in high-sensitivity sensors, optical delay lines, lasers, and more. Each structure, from a combination of model parameters and boundary conditions, supports an EPD. An EPD is a special point in the transfer matrix describing the relationship between the input and output electromagnetic fields where multiple eigenmodes coalesce in both their eigenvalues and eigenvectors. This thesis proposes an optical waveguide (OWG) structure and design containing both coupling between waveguides and reflection in the OWG using a distributed Bragg reflector. We validate the existence of the EPD by examining the behavior of the system through numerical methods and examine properties of the transfer function in a finite length structure.